For all its heft, a nimble piece of entertainment and an insightful historical recreation.
Braccia tenders Cicero’s testament to his son about his thwarted ambitions in the Roman Senate.
The author has clearly done his homework into the life and times of Cicero, and even readers with reservations about the great orator’s beliefs and tactics will appreciate the honest hand he brings to the proceedings. Cicero was largely a decent man, given to private philanthropy rather than state handouts and love for the relative freedom of the senate. Readers may equally appreciate Braccia’s comfortably unhurried yet lively pace as he moves the story through reams of detail and enough three-barreled Roman names to choke a horse. The author lays bare the complexities of the Roman political process–with its power plays, privilege, influence pedaling, sedition, enmity and unscrupulous scheming–and it is easy to slip into the story and take sides. Cicero’s maturity in the Roman Senate came during the rise of Julius Caesar, a wonderfully intriguing time, and Cicero is not above indecision and vacillation, which gives him a gathering humanity. The author draws Caesar with the same clarity and passion–a brilliant soldier and demagogue, busy muzzling the Senate and Forum and just as busy in bed with almost every senator’s wife. (A tip of the hat goes to Braccia for handling the sex scenes with both color and restraint.) Cicero’s gradual estrangement from the optimates is sensibly unfurled, and his distaste for the ambitious, avaricious Caesar is ample: “I could not countenance his power because it was acquired through war on his fellow citizens; and the exercise of that power was not with the Senate and the People, but over them” An abundance of forcefully effective nuggets, such as the Parthians pouring molten gold down Crassus’ throat, gives the tale the drama it deserves.
For all its heft, a nimble piece of entertainment and an insightful historical recreation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4490-4341-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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